So I’m starting to break my drought on personal-project coding, and yesterday I cut a new release of RPC-XML, the first one since September of 2012. I’m pretty happy about this; besides the fact that I was able to clear out my pull-request queue on GitHub, this means that I’m (slowly) getting my “old self” back. I’m (slowly) starting to work on my hobby-programming, and no longer seem to be limited to just doing my work for my day job.

Then this morning I checked my RSS feed for CPAN Testers Reports. NINE failures, all of them tests that passed just fine on my dev platform and on my Linux server. Tested with multiple Perl versions, etc. Granted, I don’t test other versions/platforms exhaustively, not compared to some people at least. But the things that seem to be failing are tests that have always passed before. Like, suddenly some of the tests that actually create server objects are failing to bind to their given address, saying that it’s already in use. Except that I programmatically select a port by first establishing that it is not in use. I suppose that theoretically it is possible that some other process stepped in between the time I do the port-detection and the time I actually allocate the server object. But like I said, these are tests that were passing just fine before. There are some others, as well, that seem to be consistently problematic for people who are not me. But I don’t get a lot of information from the CPAN Testers reports, just the output from “make test”, really. So until/unless I can replicate those failures, I’m not sure how to address them.

This isn’t really what I pictured, when I finally started getting back in the saddle…

This entry was posted
on Friday, February 7th, 2014 at 7:50 AM and is filed under CPAN, Perl.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “CPAN Testers and RPC-XML: Well, Crap”

The whole point of the cpantesters is to test our code in other – sometimes strange environments.

You can contact the individual testers and ask for more information from them http://stats.cpantesters.org/cpanmail.html
or you can put diag() messages in your tests printing out the information you’d need for you to try to figure out what’s going on.
There is also a mailing list of cpantesters where you can ask for help/clarifications.

If I understood the specific issue of a port not being available, I wonder if that machine has not locked down all of its ports for security reasons?